Articles from 1936
Attached is a chart pulled from a 1936 issue of THE LITERARY DIGEST that reported on the U.S. urban homicide rate spanning the years 1926 through 1935. It indicates that the murder rate began climbing during the economic depression (from 8.8 in 1928); the years 1934 through 1936 saw a steady decline in urban homicide, more than likely as a result of the end of Prohibition.
St. NAZAIRE, 1918. It was eleven in the morning when we first heard the news. A piercing whistle from one of the steamers in the harbor, a sudden blast so loud and so startling that even the nurses in their rest camp in La Baule fifteen kilometers away could hear it…L’ARMISTICE EST SIGNÉ…by noon the entire town was outdoors; a truck load of German prisoners rolled past, apparently quite as happy as the rest of us.
The attached article was written nineteen years after the smoke cleared over Vimy Ridge and succinctly tells the story of that battle in order that we can better understand why thousands of Canadian World War One veterans crossed the ocean a second time in order to witness the unveiling of the memorial dedicated to those Canadians who died there:
Walter S. Allward (1876 – 1955), Canadian sculptor, worked fourteen years on the completion of the monument, which cost $1,500,000.
The article also touches upon some of the weird events that have taken place at Vimy Ridge since the war ended…
Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.
I have read many interesting stories about heroes of the war and interesting accounts of pigeons, and police dogs, etc., but very little about the horses that served…Many of them were taken prisoner by the Germans, taken back into Germany and exhibited in their American harnesses and equipment. After the war, immediate plans were made to return the American men to their native country, but the equine warriors were forgotten…
This article is about the 32 American horses that were captured in the war and never repatriated.
Attached are two short notices from 1936 and ’39 reporting that Japan’s army and navy budgets were expanding. Mention is also made concerning the growth of the Soviet military.
A brief notice reporting on Prince Teh Wang (Prince Demchugdongrub 1902 – 1966), ruler of Inner Mongolia, who, in an attempt to create an independent Mongolia, simply ruled as an appeaser of Imperial Japan:
While Prince Teh’s position, as a Japanese puppet, can scarcely be less comfortable than it was before , Japan has a grip on the bottle-neck controlling a vast, ill-defined hinterland of North China; and has as well a buffer State between her own influence and that of the Soviets.
This 1936 magazine article reported that Germany had spent a considerable sum on munitions and armaments throughout much of the previous year and was not likely to stop anytime soon. In light of this fact, the French and British governments were moved to do the same:
Winston Churchill, a cherubic reddish-haired Cassandra, bobbed up in the House of Commons again last week to warn his countrymen of the ‘remorseless hammers’ of the world.
This 1936 magazine article reported that Germany had spent a considerable sum on munitions and armaments throughout much of the previous year and was not likely to stop anytime soon. In light of this fact, the French and British governments were moved to do the same:
Winston Churchill, a cherubic reddish-haired Cassandra, bobbed up in the House of Commons again last week to warn his countrymen of the ‘remorseless hammers’ of the world.
At midnight, December 31, the Naval Limitations Treaty of 1930 will expire and, tho a treaty of a sort was negotiated last April, apparently it will not be ratified and put into effect by the end of the year.
With this in mind, Congress authorized the construction of two battleships at the cost of $50,000,000 each.
And is it worth it, in these days of fleet and deadly torpedo planes or great diving bombers clutching demolition bombs weighing a ton apiece? Naval experts think so. The Battleship, they say, is still the backbone of the battle-fleet. In the phrase of the street, the battleship can dish it out.
The Navy would soon learn that they were actually living in the age of the aircraft carrier.
Click here to read more about the expansion of the U.S. Navy.
This is a sports article that summarizes the meteoric course of the Green Bay Packers, from their earliest days in 1918, when Curly Lambeau approached a meat packing plant beseeching their patronage in order that the team could have uniforms, to the high perch they held in 1936.
Consider for a moment the success this team has had, coming as it does from the smallest city in the pro league. After battling first division teams in the National Professional Football League for many years, the Packers finally came through and won three successive world championships in 1929, 1930 and 1931… If you were to ask most college football stars which pro team they would like to play on, most of them would invariably answer, ‘The Green Bay Packers‘.
Keeping abreast with current need, the Traphagan School (New York) offers for the first time a course in fashion journalism, which prepares students for positions on magazines and newspapers in advertising departments and agencies where they will interpret in words what they themselves or some other designer relates. The course is conducted by Marie Stark, formerly associate editor of Vogue…
Back in the day, he was responsible for casting 91,000 film actors each year, he was,
Hollywood’s No. 1 casting director, Billy Grady: broad-shouldered, open-faced Irishman, a terror to counterfeits, a down-right softy when he encounters an honest man – or woman.
This article tells much of his life story and provides a blow-by-blow as to what his days were like. One of the more interesting aspects of the article addressed the charities that were designed to aid and comfort those many souls who worked as extras in the movies. Today, extra players (also known as ‘atmosphere) are extended benefits through the Screen Actors Guild – but this was not always the case.
As the rosy fingered dawn came upon America in 1913 it found Douglas Fairbanks, the man who would soon be Silent Hollywood’s fair haired boy, wowing the crowds on Broadway. The play, Hawthorne of the U.S.A., starred Fairbanks in the title roll and closed after 72 performances; he was also married to a woman who wasn’t named Pickford – but rather named Anna Beth Sully, who had sired his namesake. Life was good for the actor and he wouldn’t turn his gaze West for another two years. By contrast, his future bride, Mary Pickford (né Gladys Smith, 1892 – 1979) had been prancing before the cameras since 1909 and by the time 1913 rolled around had appeared in well-over 100 short films and earned the nickname Little Mary.
Industrial designer Egmont Arens (1889 – 1966) wrote the attached design review covering the American cars of 1937:
Perhaps it was just one of life’s little ironies that overtook the automobile manufacturers a year ago. In their zeal to provide what they called ‘streamlined’ design, they took the tear-drop for their model, and the results were tearful indeed – to the sales managers. For they all looked alike…
The word ‘Streamlining’ got everybody a little confused, I am afraid, and off the track. Here was a term out of aerodynamics, invented to describe a solid shape that moves easily through fluid mediums, as the wings and fuselage of an airplane. The human eye responded gratefully to the flow of line prescribed by the laws of physics, and thus streamlining became synonymous with modern beauty. Industrial designers sprang up at every hand, and their main business was ‘streamlining’.
The attached magazine article is for any sentimental sap who has never crossed the water to walk wander pensively upon that ground where the blood once flowed between the years 1914 and 1918. It concerns the July 14, 1936 reunion at Verdun where many of the old combatants of the Great War were:
Called together at historic Fort Douaumont, captured and retaken a score of times during those dark days of 1916, to swear a solemn oath to work for peace, the disillusioned survivors of their father’s folly found Verdun changed, yet unchanged and changeless.
Click here to read another article concerning peace-loving veterans of World War One.
To listen to Paul Meltsner one would think that it was fun to be a painter. Looking at his pictures one is compelled to conclude that life is a grim business of industrial strife, with factories shut down or picketed…
A wise-cracker and a wit at the cafe table, Mr. Meltsner is a proletarian artist when he works, and he works hard, he says. Which is what a proletarian artist should do… He exhibits frequently. He sells lithographs when he isn’t selling paintings and is represented in a number of museum collections.
Click here to read a Paul Meltsner review from ART DIGEST.
The artist Paul R. Meltsner (1905 – 1966) was one of many WPA artists given to depicting sweaty, mal-nourished proletarians laboring in the fore-ground of smoke-plagued, industrial cityscapes and his work can be found today in the vaults of every major American museum. This is a 1936 art review covering his one-man show at the Midtown Galleries in New York:
Meltsner builds his pictures everyday scenes of industrial life, dedicating them to labor and the machine…He gets broad vitality in his forms and force in his compositions, relieving at the same time the usual drabness of such scenes by a tonic of color.
Another 1936 article about Paul Meltsner can be read here.
An amusing, if blasphemous, art review of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 Dada and Surrealism exhibit.
The journalist oddly credited Joan Miro as the author of the Dada movement.
The Marx Brothers of the art world are displayed, in all their unrestrained glory, in an exhibition of Fantastic Art in New York this week.
An exhibition of this type is always easy prey for the practical joker. A similar show in Paris several years ago exhibited a shovel, submitted by a well-known but discontented artist as an example of perfect symmetry.
Click here to read about the contempt that the Nazis had for Modern Art.
